Haswell

A perfectly balanced vehicle, premium or not, would also not be weaker than other vehicles at least in the sense of gameplay viability. Sure it can be weaker in one aspect (ie. durability) than others, but other aspects can then be made comparatively stronger. That would be the perfect world where nobody could say "X is better than Y" in generalization without examining the specific circumstances, but sadly nothing can ever be perfect. In the case of current balancing, a good premium vehicle could be one that is on par with the best performing (statistically) progression vehicle of the same playstyle, with some differences in characteristics (ie. slightly better mobility for slightly worse firepower) to give players a sense of variety. It certainly wouldn't be as appealing or sell as well as something that is blatantly broken (note: not overpowered, big difference), but that's the price to pay for having well-balanced vehicles to promote healthier gameplay. There has to be some way that balance can be marketed as a selling point, even if the benefits aren't immediately obvious. Vehicles can also be made attractive by having perks that don't directly affect gameplay balance (ie. 640 with its 1.25x multipliers). Assume that the game economy isn't in complete shambles like it is now, extra XP and credit multipliers would easily add appeal to otherwise boring vehicles. Theses perks wouldn't necessarily have to be constant, they could come and go on rotating schedules to periodically refresh the appeal of older vehicles to older players, and entice newer players to purchase them. For example, say there are monthly events that focus on specific categories of vehicles (ie. heavy AFV, light AFV, wheeled TDs, etc), and premium vehicles of said category in focus would receive income bonuses for the duration of the event. This would also have the positive side effect regularly of shaking up the gameplay meta since certain vehicles would become more popular, preventing stagnation without having to keep releasing new vehicles to keep gameplay fresh. If anything, the game desperately need regular and continuous credit sinks NOT in the form of overprogression to bring the economy back down to sane levels. Perhaps the base system would offer a solution, but that's going off on a wild tangent. I realize the goal of any game development is to earn profit, unless it's a pet project of some sort. But even then there are ways to monetize game content without compromising gameplay balance or overall game health (ie. playerbase sustainability). It's like the fishing industry, overfishing will definitely generate great profit at the cost of being unsustainable in the long run, while sustainable fishing will ensure profits to continue a great deal longer, and most likely far more profitable than trying to make all the money as fast as possible.

Just to stop the dumpster fire from starting, keep in mind that official game staff are here on the forum in an unofficial capacity unless they state otherwise. Same goes for anything they say, it would simply be their personal opinion unless they indicate differently. Think of it as bumping into your landlord or local management at a pub, they are there to chitchat with people and enjoy themselves just like you and I do. Don't grill or harass them, treat them as you would want to be treated yourself. I have very little experience in PvP, so I'll comment only on the PvE aspect here. And since we don't really have any details for the 0.33 rebalance yet I'll base my comments on the current meta instead. The tier 8 squishy dakka meta right now includes the K21, Marder, Griffin and Bradley. K21 and Marder are damage incarnates, Griffin specializes in high consistent damage over time and great stationary camo, Bradley kind of just derps around. All of them are fairly adept at vision control (except for the Marder, but it's also not bad) with very decent damage output, with moderate mobility. The Stalker could fill the niche of having high mobility and great vision control (but not necessarily both view range and camo at the same time), at the cost of comparatively lower damage output (think BMD-2M levels), which is basically what the article suggested. The hard part would be how to balance it as to not make the VBR completely redundant, since the VBR already do the same things at the cost of having wheels instead of tracks. The obvious way would be to simply let the Stalker have slightly lower vision control capabilities, lower total view range and camo for example, but still higher than the other tracked AFVs. Admittedly this sort of low damage output, high vision control playstyle wouldn't necessarily be friendly or easy for inexperienced players, nor applicable in every map. This may decrease the appeal of the Stalker to the average player, but likely no worse than the VBR already does. Rosomak is a turd who's only saving grace is the autohoming missiles, so I won't even try to compare it.

Leftover coins go to waste, so blow them all on the lootboxes when they inevitably become available at the end of the BP. At the very least you might get an extra booster here and there. Boosters can be used indefinitely for any of the upcoming BPs, so save them up.

Part 3 of rebalancing, ERA galore. https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/tier-7-10-rebalance-part-3-era

What did you actually say? I doubt you got banned over a single comment, unless there's something I'm missing here.

Just a heads up, the final Enigma mission that requires you to kill 7 bots in the first 3 minutes, actually require eliminates. Found that out the hard way yesterday.

Moved to metagame.

This actually sounds fun, if a bit masochistic when the inevitable bad ideas come up. *notes down time to tune in*

... because Swingfire spam made low tiers so fun to play, right? It must be very fun and dynamic for new and inexperienced players to get nuked by bots that they couldn't spot. If that is considered to be a success, I have serious reservations about whatever changes they have in mind. Yes, yes, take all of my yeses, so long as they become considerably more blind and easy to spot compared to squishies. As much as MBTs are meant as a universal class, they simply can't have armor and vision control ability at the same time for the sake of balance. Proper vision control is an important skill to learn and master for squishy vehicles, but right now there's no real incentive for pubbies to learn it when they can be almost as effective simply by driving forward in MBTs. So long as this doesn't lead to situations where MBTs get pelted by unspotted bots (as it already happens at lower tiers), I'm all in support of it. One big thing I noticed from the article is that it only mentions AP ammo but not HEAT/HESH/PELE, my first thought is that all this talk of balancing revolves solely around PvP and ignores PvE completely. HEAT spam will still reign supreme in PvE thanks to the higher alpha, thus the changes to AP can practically be ignored for the most part. This is also an indirect nerf to bot MBTs since they spam AP with impunity, meaning players may be able to take less damage from bots shooting at long ranges. The lack of penetration decay in bot TDs is a non-issue considering there are very few tracked TDs with guns (ie. Sprut), though this might change if bots suddenly start driving wheeled vehicles. I actually dislike the proposal to turn TDs into dedicated long range vehicles. The current PvE maps simply don't have engagement ranges long enough for TDs to exercise their accuracy advantage over any other class as it is, not to mention the god awful armored brick corridor meta in spec ops. Decreasing their DPM will just make them more unappealing to play over lights and AFVs. That is not how lights are actually played right now, contrary to whatever vision the devs have. The vision control capabilities of lights right now are very comparable and even competitive to squishy TDs and AFVs, to the point where all three classes are practically interchangeable for vision control purposes and they all basically play the same way: run around, stay unspotted, maximize DPM by virtue of not getting shot at. Unless lights also get their view ranges nerfed, I don't see them being anything more than merely TDs on tracks as they are now. Take the K21 and Wilk for example, the only things that differentiate them both are wheels vs tracks, and PELE for the Wilk. Let me know when infantry commands get added first. Obligatory "Leo 1 has heavy armor" joke. I question why class traits have to be so limiting that they overshadow individual vehicle balancing, such as why the Leo 1 has garbage mobility just because it's classed as an MBT or why light tanks have mediocre accuracy almost universally (ie. Stingray vs LAV-600). Without knowing the exact changes to each vehicle, it's hard to tell whether the proposed changes are good or not.

Part two of the Five Year Plan published: https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/tier-7-10-rebalance-part-2-class-roles

Voting has closed, congrats to TeyKey and Seb! Both prospect moderators have been contacted on Discord.

80% of all your shots fired must hit and deal damage. Trying to do that in an autocannon just takes too much effort, it's easier with the Nork.

Some gameplay footage of the Stalker, they are going for the 2 missile config I guess. The launcher looks like it has fairly poor elevation and depression angles, and it has a long reload animation. So it's basically a Mephisto, but with a dakka and two fewer missiles without autohoming. Solidly meh at first glance.

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/now-available-hunter-afv-0 Blah blah blah, boxes available again for one week. Seeing how there's still 50 days left to the BP, I predict the boxes will return again at least twice: once in August, and another near the end of the BP. Like I said, trust in their greed if nothing else.

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/maintenance-july-23 Meh.